Sheriff's office still struggling to hire

The Custer County Board of Commissioners meeting Nov. 7 started with the certification of the General Election results, which brought a high turnout across Custer County with a rate of 76 percent.
In the meeting, the commission approved the sheriff’s office contract with the City of Custer for law enforcement services.
Sheriff Marty Mechaley also told the commission that the department’s trouble hiring and retaining employees has persisted because they can’t offer salaries that are as competitive as other departments. Combined with a sparse and expensive housing market, getting employees is difficult, and getting them to stick around can be even harder.  
“We need to really sit down and look at this pay situation. We can’t keep running short like we are,” said Mechaley.
The most recent person the department offered a job to turned them down, asking for higher wages.
“I think he looked at housing, penciled some things out and withdrew his application. I think he would have been a really good candidate, but we’re not having a lot of luck,” said Mechaley.
Mechaley said it was a good candidate and they will likely have to hire someone less qualified. With retirements coming up in the department, Mechaley wants to keep the sheriff’s office in good shape, but the hiring situation is making it tough.
“It’s becoming a safety issue. There’s a lot of stuff that’s been going on in this county for the last couple of years. We shouldn’t have deputies patrolling an entire county by themselves and we shouldn’t have to work this many hours either, but thats what we’re faced with. We’re kind of burned out. Hopefully we can do something to fix it,” said Mechaley.  
“We’ll look into it,” said commissioner Michael Busskohl.
Mechaley also told the commission that someone from Pennington County Sheriff’s Office would be coming to Custer in the near future to talk about the Pennington County expansion project. Custer County currently has an agreement with Pennington County for its jail services, and Mechaley said he was happy with the arrangement.
“Pennington County does a very good job with the jail so I’d like to keep that relationship with them,” said Mechaley.
The commissioners approved the appraisal for a piece of U.S. Forest Service land which is in the process of being conveyed to the Custer County Airport. The 63.25 acres was appraised  at $550,000 with a retroactive date of March 19, 2019. The appraisal was done at the cost of $8,000 by Dakota Appraisals. The county may be able to use federal funding to pay up to the appraisal cost.
The approval of the appraisal invoice was one of many steps in the process of the county acquiring the land from the U.S. Forest Service.
“We’ve come a long way and I don’t want to see us stop at this point,” said commissioner Mark Hartman.
The commission also agreed to sign onto letters of complaint to property owners near where prairie dogs had encroached onto county right-of-ways in the southern end of the county.
The commission also discussed moving the dates of the Dec. 4 and Dec.18 meetings to Dec. 11 and Dec. 30, respectively, and it will be on the agenda at the next meeting, which is Nov. 20 at 8 a.m.